Ted Pemberton reviews The Enfield Haunting off the telly in his own unique style.

I didn’t want to watch this at all, because I didn’t believe in ghosts and poltergeists or any of that gubbins, but it was in my contract or something so I had no choice in the matter. Now I’m glad that I did, and I’ve become a firm believer.

The Enfield Haunting is the absolutely true story of a malevolent entity which manifested itself in the manner of a poltergeist in an ordinary house in an ordinary street in Enfield back in the 1970s when people wore baggy pants and drove around in Ford Capris with Marc Bolan blasting out of the 8 track stereo. Anyway, back in the old days the story was in all the papers and even on the telly quite a bit, probably because there were only three channels back then and they were usually all shite with fuck all on, a bit like today really, except now we have hundreds of channels with bugger all on.

On a positive note, The Enfield Haunting has Barry the dopey Brummie out of Auf Wiedersehen Pet in it, although sadly not Oz or Wayne who couldn’t really have been in it anyway because he’s dead in real life. Not Oz – Wayne. Oz is alive and probably dancing around the toon of a freyder neet in his crocodile shoes. Unless he’s gone to Memphis again to meet up with the ghost of Elvis at Graceland like the bloke in that song who walked about in Memphis for a bit. But not Wayne because like I said, in real life he’s dead. And he couldn’t have been the poltergeist because he didn’t die until afterwards. In real life.

Anyway, to cut a long story short – these two young girls get poltergismed by this evil spirit thing and it’s doing their mum and dad’s heads in, so Barry turns up in an E Type Jag to sort things out because he’s in some sort of psychical research society. (Not Barry, the bloke in real life who he’s playing, who is also dead in real life like Wayne, but not like Oz who isn’t dead at all in real life. At least not that we’re aware of.)

When Barry can’t cope he gets some bloke called Giles in to help him out. Giles knows lots about hauntings and stuff because he wrote a book about it, but in this case he’s not much cop at all really so they call a psychic medium in and she talks in somebody else’s voice and some stuff moves about the room a bit and it’s absolutely terrifying. When this doesn’t work, one of the girls starts talking in a croaky voice which freaks everybody out, so they put her in hospital where she falls out of bed at least once.

In the end it turns out that the ghost thing is the spirit of an old bloke who popped his clogs in the house in the armchair and he’s a bit pissed off about stuff in general. This is confirmed when Barry goes to see the bloke’s son, who’s played by Spider out of Coronation Street and who confirms that the old man was a grumpy old git who didn’t particularly get along with people.

And then it all ends and everybody gets back to normal, or something like it. I’d have liked to have done a better, more detailed review of this, but it’s almost three hours long and I’d drank nearly a full bottle of whisky so my memory is a little bit fuzzy, but as I was stumbling up the stairs to bed, having switched the telly off and the lights out, some poltergeist presence tripped me up on the stairs and I crashed down face first and really hurt my hooter. Put the willies right up me did that.